Davis Cup defeat has Britain fighting to avoid Algeria

The sight of Andy Murray sitting courtside in a neck brace yesterday offered a depressing vignette of Great Britain's dismal Davis Cup weekend. The misery and discomfort on his face as he watched Jamie Delgado lose the decisive rubber 6-3, 6-4, 6-7, 2-6, 6-3 to hand Israel an unassailable 3-1 lead made Murray the perfect image for a thoroughly demoralising weekend that saw Great Britain condemned to a relegation play-off away to Ukraine in September.

Defeat there will mean the Euro-African Zone Group Two, the third division of the competition, but on the evidence of the last three days that is the nation's natural place without Murray in the game's world order. With Tim Henman retired from the Davis Cup, Greg Rusedski on the verge of following suit and Murray the only representative of the current generation with sufficient talent to be a force in the competition, Great Britain is effectively a one-man team.

If, as widely believed, the tie against Israel was Jeremy Bates's last as captain, then his successor will inherit the same problem that has dogged successive British Davis Cup leaders: a critical lack of depth. Murray put in a game effort to come back from two sets down to beat Andy Ram on Friday but he injured his neck diving for a volley during his and Delgado's five-set defeat by Ram and Jonathan Erlich on Saturday and the moment he hit the grass his team's hopes of winning were effectively crushed.

With Great Britain beginning the day at 2-1 down, Delgado was charged with winning the first reverse singles match against Noam Okun yesterday, a task for which he proved ultimately ill-equipped. Given that the 29-year-old is ranked 437, is only British No14 and has never won a Davis Cup rubber, it would have been unreasonable to expect him to beat Okun, a stalwart ranked 167 places higher.

In the event Delgado performed admirably and his efforts in fighting back from two sets down to take the match into a fifth set cannot be faulted. He sat slumped in a towel at the end of the match as the jubilant Israelis celebrated on the other side of the net.

Delgado could barely maintain his composure afterwards, his red eyes and trembling voice betraying the disappointment of a man who had blown fifth-set leads on consecutive days. He and Murray held a point for a 5-1 lead before losing to Erlich and Ram in the doubles and Delgado was a break up in the fifth set against Okun yesterday.

Alex Bogdanovic's predictable first-day defeat by Okun did not help but neither he nor Delgado should be held responsible for the loss. The failure was a systemic one and can be solved only if the changes under way in British tennis take root.

Roger Draper, the Lawn Tennis Association's chief executive, was courtside all weekend and, though he is too smooth an operator to betray outwardly any sign of concern, he must be inwardly gasping at the extent of the job he has ahead of him. Draper has already sacked key personnel at the LTA, including the performance director David Felgate, but he will need to be equally ruthless in the future to end the culture of mediocrity in British tennis.

Bates is head of performance at the LTA and assumed Felgate's duties when the latter was fired but he did not sound like a man either happy or secure in his position when speaking publicly at the weekend. There is a shortage of possible replacements for Bates as Davis Cup captain and, while it must be assumed that Henman and Rusedski would both consider the role once they have retired, the former British No1 John Lloyd, who was Davis Cup coach during his brother David's captaincy in the late 1990s, was the name on most lips yesterday.

Whoever is captain when the side travel to Kiev to take on Ukraine in September will have a difficult job. Ukraine's players are not household names in their own country but Israel's squad was hardly stuffed with high-profile players and yet still exposed Great Britain's weaknesses. Defeat by the Ukraine would mean relegation to scrap and scrape alongside the likes of Macedonia, Algeria and Norway.

The last time Great Britain were so close to dropping down was in 1997 when by a peculiar twist of fate the team also had to win an away tie in Ukraine. On that occasion Rusedski won the deciding rubber to keep the team up and give it a momentum that eventually saw them challenging in the World Group, the top division of the competition. Unfortunately a similar revival seems unlikely. Henman and Rusedski had each other. Murray, it appears, must fight on alone.